Mobile communication devices, such as cellular telephones, two-way pagers, and wireless enabled personal digital assistants, have become mainstream. Through the use of one of these mobile communication devices, a person is accessible for participating in interactive communication as they engage in their daily activities. As a result, people are now more accessible than ever.
However, as a result of being more accessible, people are also now more unavailable for participating personally in interactive communication. In many instances, even though a person is accessible for communication, it is often inconvenient or inappropriate for the person to personally engage in interactive communication. For example, while in a meeting, a person may be accessible via their mobile communication device. However, during the meeting and for any number of reasons, it may be inappropriate or inconvenient for the person to attend personally and interactively to an inbound communication. This may be the case even though it is a telephone call or text message that the person needs to or would like to respond personally and immediately.
Call waiting, call return, voice mail, electronic assistants and unified messaging systems illustrate examples of conventional communication solutions. Such conventional communication solutions are limited in their ability to facilitate an interactive communication activity in a personalized, time-sensitive and dynamic manner when one or more participants associated with the interactive communication activity are precluded from attending personally to the interactive communication activity. Specifically, conventional solutions help with call filtering (e.g., via caller id or electronic communication assistants). These conventional solutions do not address the process of actually communicating with another party beyond facilitating manual intervention on the subscriber's part or call redirection (e.g., call forwarding or divert, follow-me). That is, they may result in a communication being redirected to another device, but do not interactively and dynamically assist with the actual communication dialog.
Therefore, a method for enabling interactive communication to be facilitated in a manner that overcomes the limitations of such conventional communication solutions would be useful.